Everywhere you go at the moment, the radio, TV, the Internet are
full of establishment Republicansthe morons who enthusiastically
helped the Democrats get us into this messattacking what they call
Ron Paul's "isolationism", a slur first invented by the Franklin
Roosevelt Administration (whose economic policies had only made the
Depression worse, and which was desperate to get into a war that would
cover up its failures) to insult Robert Taft and others who saw no
reason for America to get involved in what became the Second World
War.

A conflict that killed 60,000,000 individuals.

Paul is not an isolationist, any more than Bob Taft was. He is a
non-interventionist, a leader unwilling to drop bombs on pregnant
widows and ten-year-old goatherds, or starve half a million children
to death in pursuit of a foreign policy that, for more than a century,
now, has been an exercise in stupidity, insanity, and pure malignant
evil. Paul, and an increasing number of people like him would rather
sell things to people overseas than kill them. Dead people can't buy
anything.

In terms of trade and other peaceful relations, Paul is a one-
worlder.

So let's get something straight once and for all.

In the 20th and 21st centuries alone, so far, 630,744 Americans,
mostly young men in uniform, have been killed in two "world wars" and
at least seventeen other conflicts that the United States government
will admit to. Since, famously, "Truth is the first casualty of war,"
it's reasonable to suspect that the actual numberboth of wars and
fatalitiesis considerably higher. For example, when I was an
Explorer Scout, at the start of the war in Vietnam, the military unit
that sponsored my post was actively engaged in the African nation of
Mali.

Six hundred thirty thousand, seven hundred forty-four American war
dead, any one of whom might otherwise have found a cure for cancer, a
source of free, clean energy, a faster-than-light star drive, or
anti-gravity.

And what for?

To fight Spain in Cuba (an 1898 war I count as belonging to the
20th century) over a battleship explosion that was almost certainly an
accident?

To fight tribesmen in the Philippines whom we had promised to set
free?

To fish Europe's chestnuts out of the anti-colonial fire (as it
turns out, an extremely bad precedent) during the Boxer Rebellion in
China?

To interfere with a Mexican civil war on behalf of American
corporations?

To occupy Haiti 20 years to benefit the National City Bank of New
York?

To interfere, completely unnecessarily, in an idiotic squabble
between Queen Victoria's spoiled and genetically impoverished
grandchildren?

To refight the same war, equally unnecessary and the direct result
of infantile, power-hungry blundering by the winners of the first
dragging the Far East into the meleeand end it by killing hundreds
of thousands of innocent individuals with fire bombings and nuclear
weapons?

To stick our nosesand our young people's already war-weary
necksinto other people's business in war that has never really
ended?

To imitate British and French stupidity in Southeast Asia with
a war many believe was only meant to prove to the Russians and Chinese
that we are crazy buggers willing to fight and die for no reason at
all?

To send troops to El Salvador, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf (not just
once, but twice), the island of Grenada, the Isthmus of Panama, the
dirt heaps of Somalia and Bosnia to prove that we're the cops of the
world?

And most recently to Iraq, on absolutely false pretenses, because
America's rulers, like rulers all over the world, with their heads
buried in six thousand years of dust, can neither conceive of or
comprehend a major historical event that does not somehow involve a
government?

When a century of incompetent, irrational, murderous foreign
policy, climaxing in the deaths of something like half a million Iraqi
children due a U.S./U.N. embargo that denied them food and medicine,
blew up in their faces, as it was bound to do, they couldn'tor
they wouldn'tbelieve that it wasn't the work of a nation-state. So
they picked one, not quite at random, at which they would strike
"back". Strictly by coincidence, mind you, it happened to be sitting
on top of the second largest obsolescent source of petroleum in the
world.

Which leaves Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, and the tragic
inability of America's rulerscranked out by the dunce factories of
Harvard, Princeton, and Yaleto learn from the experience of others,
in this case, notably, that of Russia and Britain which were never
quite the same after pouring immeasurable money and blood into those
mountains.

Six hundred thirty thousand, seven hundred forty-four American war
dead in the 20th and 21st centuries alone. Note, too, that since the
conflict in the 1940s, not one of the wars I have mentioned above were
duly declared by the Congress, as mandated by the Constitution, which
makes all of them criminal enterprises, and their perpetrators
criminals.

And here's another thought. In Vietnam, where 58,169 Americans
died for nothing, it is estimated that something like two million
Vietnamese were killed. How many millions overseas in other countries
might have lived if we'd had leaders who were sane, intelligent, and
principled, instead of the drooling pack of homicidal swine we got,
instead?

Cry "havoc" and let slip the pigs of war: Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrichnot
one of these animals sees anything wrong with the carnage, the
vast mountain of bleeding and rotting corpses, that best graphically
represents the 20th century. They dream of continuing it into the
21st. (America has troops today in 150 countries around the world,
sitting, waiting to be attacked so their masters will have an excuse
to make another war.) They jeer at anyone who wants the killing
stopped.

They call him crazy.

And 630,744 needless, useless deaths isn't?

So endeth the lessonand here's the final exam: if the war dead
could still vote, who do you suppose they'd choose in Iowa, in New
Hampshire, and next November? How about the same guy that their living
comrades send seventy percent of their political contributions to
today?